Chavez Funding American Group That Assists Illegal Migrants

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is sending $1 million a year of his oil revenue to an American organization bent on keeping America's borders wide open. Casa de Maryland openly helps migrants illegally in the United States. It also receives $4 million from the state of Maryland and Montgomery County out of a total budget of $9.5 million a year.

Chávez is knee deep in potential lawlessness. Evidence has surfaced of his intentions to ship Russian weapons to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and criminal drug cartels such as FARC, to facilitate terrorist acts against the United States, including blowing up pipelines carrying oil to the United States. He has also promised to ship both uranium to Iran to help Tehran make nuclear weapons material and oil to help break a possible refined petroleum products sanctions law now before the US Congress. How much of this is just talk and how much real? The laptop on which these Chávez plans were found was a real computer, owned by a real FARC senior commander. How much risk do we want to face?

Open borders with the world pose grave dangers to the United States. The San Diego Union described the chaos on our borders this way: “Every night, the understaffed and outnumbered Border Patrol engaged in a losing battle of cat-and-mouse with thousands of illegal immigrants being led by ruthless smugglers. ... San Ysidro residents locked themselves in at night as smugglers and immigrants traipsed through their yards. Caches of drugs were carried across the border by smugglers and the people they were leading. Hundreds of illegal immigrants lingered in the median strip of Interstate 5 waiting for rides northward. Immigrants running across freeways were hit and killed by motorists."

A USA Columnist visited the border to examine the prospects for a fence. She wrote: : “The carnage makes one wonder why environmental groups aren’t out lobbying for a sturdy border fence — instead of arguing against tougher border enforcement.”

But we not only have a problem at the border. The United States still has no reliable system for verifying that foreign visitors have left the country. Federal officials estimate that “40 percent of the…illegal immigrants in the United States came on legal visas and overstayed.”

At a recent community event in Maryland, a veteran Democrat legislator told me there was no problem in Casa de Maryland receiving funding from Chávez because "Venezuela is a model for Latin and Central American development". I thought she must have been kidding. Inflation in the country is over 30% and may reach twice that. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Chávez has so mismanaged the economy the country does not produce enough coffee for domestic consumption for the first time ever. The currency has dropped in value by over half as Chávez prints money wildly.

Casa de Maryland condemns those who advocate effective limits on immigration as racists, as does Chávez. It has threatened civil disobedience should the US Congress not approve amnesty. It publishes pamphlets that instruct people to refuse to cooperate with immigration and law enforcement officials.

The Times Square bomber, or the Detroit underwear bomber, are just a couple of numerous examples of the latest example of the connection between lax immigration laws--or lax enforcement of the laws we already have-- and potential terrorism. In the case of the Times Square clown, it was a case of granting citizenship to someone from a known state sponsored terrorist hotbed (Pakistan) and apparently looking the other way when reviewing what appears to be a sham marriage. How much worse is it to give tax-exempt status to those who actively seek to leave unprotected our borders while supporting themselves with funds from terror supporting states?

FamilySecurityMatters.orgContributing Editor Peter Huessy is on the Board of the Maryland Taxpayers Association and is President of Geostrategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland, a national security firm.

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